Despite the hype about disruption, the truth is most tech giants, particularly platform providers, are not so much displaced as they are eclipsed. IBM, for example, has been successfully selling and servicing mainframes for going on 50 years (although they are now in serious trouble (members-only)). During the PC era, though, they were eclipsed by […]
Articles
The Diminished iPad
Something very strange is happening this week: there is an Apple event, and very few people – including myself – are particularly jazzed up about it. Oh sure, I’ll watch it, and I hope I’m surprised, but there is very little in the rumor mill – a retina iMac, OS X Yosemite, and the iPad […]
PayPal’s Incentive Problem
By winning on the web, PayPal was actually disadvantaged when it came to competing in mobile, because its incentives were already shaped by a different problem.
Ello and Consumer-Friendly Business Models
Vox introduced Ello this way: A brand-new social networking startup — Ello — has gone viral. At one point on Thursday, the site was acquiring 31,000 new users an hour — many of whom flocked to there because of a disagreement with Facebook over its policy requiring real names, which some say is unfair to […]
Why Now for Apple Watch
The impression I get is that many people don’t really understand why I changed my mind about the Apple Watch. In Apple Watch: Asking Why and Saying No I criticized the lack of an explicit “why” in the Watch presentation and questioned parts of the demo, particular those which replicated phone functionality. After all, if […]
Don’t Blame Uber
At the risk of painting too broad a stroke, it seems to me that much of the opposition to changes wrought by the Internet undervalue the positive impact said changes have on normal people. For example, people despair over newspapers closing without appreciating the explosion in quality content freely available to anyone anywhere in the […]
What I Got Wrong About Apple Watch
While I stand by last week’s opinion that the Watch presentation was poor, I’ve somehow, at least in my little corner of the Internet, become the face of people who don’t believe in Apple Watch at all. The biggest problem with that view is that I’m actually a big believer in the category, having written […]
Microsoft’s Good (and Potentially Great) Minecraft Acquisition
It’s difficult to overstate what a big deal Minecraft is. It’s the third best-selling game of all time behind Tetris and Wii Sports, and unlike the latter especially, it is a remarkably sticky experience: the vast majority of customers (over 90 percent on PC, according to Microsoft) sign in every single month. Were Microsoft to […]
Apple Watch: Asking Why and Saying No
Dan Frommer wrote in Quartz about The Hidden Structure of the Apple Keynote. His analysis covered 27 events since 2007, and included things like average length, laughs per executive, and the timing of iPhone reveals. It’s a good read, but in light of the Watch introduction, I am more interested in comparing yesterday’s keynote to […]
Wearables, Payments, Chickens and Eggs
I feel a bit sheepish that this is the third of what will in all likelihood be four articles about Apple in a two-week span. I figured the scale of what Apple is planning to announce necessitated at least two preview posts; one about the iPhone and this one about wearables and payments. And then […]